Mark Warner, as the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is briefed regularly on what’s going on in the world’s hot spots.
Funny thing about that is, the Virginia Democrat, because of those briefings, knows more about what’s happening behind the scenes in the Middle East, Ukraine and North Korea than he does on the other side of Capitol Hill.
“I say this kind of glibly, but well, I’ve received lots of classified briefings in the last few days about what’s going on on the ground in Israel, how do we make sure this conflict doesn’t extend into Lebanon or in the West Bank, continued updates on the Ukrainian counteroffensive. Getting good intelligence about what is going to happen out of the House of Representatives? I got no great sources there,” Warner told reporters this week.
What we all know is, the House is, still, without a leader, at this writing for 19 days now, because a small group of Republican insurgents engineered the overthrow of Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker back on Oct. 3, and because the party has since been unable to coalesce around a replacement.
Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, the Trump loyalist and 2020 election denier who was the favorite of the insurgents, failed in three separate votes last week to get a majority, and now there are reportedly at least nine House Republicans lining up to take their turn in the barrel, with the next Speaker vote coming as early as Tuesday.
In the meantime, we get closer literally every day to the next manufactured crisis over the federal budget, which was the sore spot for the House Republican insurgents in the first place.
McCarthy engineered an 11th-hour bipartisan deal to avert a government shutdown on Sept. 30, kicking the can down the road to a new Nov. 17 deadline to get a budget for fiscal year 2024 done.
It was that deal that got McCarthy bounced out as House Speaker; the position of the insurgents on the deal was, basically, how dare he make a deal with moderate Republicans, Democrats and President Biden to keep government running?
“My hope is that responsible members of the Republican Party will say this kind of chaos makes no sense,” Warner said. “It basically makes our governing structures look foolish in front of Americans, in front of the world. If you don’t think this is being this kind of dysfunction is being celebrated in Moscow and Beijing, then again, you don’t have a basic understanding of geopolitics.”
Warner and Tim Kaine, D-VA, agree that the idea that has been floated that would give the acting House Speaker, Patrick McHenry, R-NC, enhanced powers in the interim so that the House can conduct business as much as usual as possible might have to be the way to go, in the here and now.
“You know, far be it for me to say I have any ability to predict what the House is going to do, but there seems to maybe be an emerging idea that you would take the temporary Speaker, vest him with powers for a limited period of time the conditions under which he took the position, enable him only to preside, to find a new Speaker, but there may be a temporary agreement under which he would be elected Speaker for a fixed period of time,” Kaine said.
“Probably the idea would be so that we can get through these budgetary decisions, the year-end budget and resolution of the question around the supplemental budget so we can provide aid for Israel and Ukraine. That seems to be an emerging idea. And that idea is sound to me, but I am not a good predictor of the House,” Kaine said.
“I’m hopeful, but again, I say glibly, getting intelligence out of what the House so-called leaders want to do, I don’t have great sources there, and I say this as somebody who has got a lot of good friends in the Senate and in the House Republican members who are equally frustrated,” Warner said.
“There’s got to be enough of my Republican friends and the Democrats as well to kind of come together and say, we need to put, in this moment of crisis, governing back as the first priority, not this kind of circular firing squad amongst some of the most extreme members of the Republican Party,” Warner said.
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Chris Graham
